British Cycling president Brian Cookson has again urged Lance Armstrong to
make a full confession and name names when he is interviewed by Oprah
Winfrey in Austin, Texas, on Monday.

An edited 90-minute version of the interview will be televised on Thursday night in the US.

Cookson, who serves on the UCI management committee and is tipped to be the next head of the sport’s governing body should Pat McQuaid depart, has been a strong voice on the issue in recent months. He has insisted that an independent commission should fully investigate the allegations made against the UCI in the United States Anti-Doping Agency report.

It included a claim that former UCI president Hein Verbruggen was paid $500,000 (£300,000) to bury a positive test given by Armstrong at the 1999 Tour de France. The report also said that Armstrong made donations totalling $125,000 (£77,000) to the UCI in 2002 as hush money after he allegedly tested positive at the 2001 Tour of Switzerland.

“If the allegations that he bribed people, that he was given a nod and a wink when the testers were approaching his house and all this kind of thing are true, let’s have that information,” Cookson said. “Who did he bribe, where were the payments made, were third parties involved and so on?

“Let’s not have innuendos and smears, let’s have the actual facts. The sort of thing Armstrong was doing, according to the report, was not just popping a few pills behind the changing rooms. It was sophisticated conspiracies, cheating over a long period of time on a large scale.

“It’s all very strange. After years and years of denials and suing people who have made accusations, he is going to either have to eat humble pie or come up with some extra layers of lies.”

The Sunday Times has taken out an advert in the ChicagoTribune listing the 10 questions it believes Winfrey must ask. The newspaper has indicated that it will sue Armstrong for £1million, the amount it paid him following a libel case in 2006.

The questions include: “Is it your intention to return the prize money you earned from September 1998 to July 2010?” and “Do you accept lying to the cancer community was the greatest deception of all?”.

SCA Promotions, who paid Armstrong $12 million (£7 million) in bonus payments for three of his last four Tour de France “wins” has said that it will wait to hear the interview before filing a lawsuit to recoup the money.